About CERIAS

Page Content

The Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS) is currently viewed as one of the world’s leading centers for research and education in areas of information security that are crucial to the protection of critical computing and communication infrastructure. CERIAS is unique among such national centers in its multidisciplinary approach to the problems, ranging from purely technical issues (e.g., intrusion detection, network security, etc) to ethical, legal, educational, communicational, linguistic, and economic issues, and the subtle interactions and dependencies among them.

The Research conducted through CERIAS includes faculty from six different colleges and 20+ departments across campus. The eight areas below summarize the research focus areas for the faculty involved with the center:

Policy, Law and Management

This area includes tools and methods for understanding the context of security, and how to best allocate resources for protection of assets. This includes research into risk assessment and mitigation methodologies, policy development, the role of law and social pressure on security, economic aspects of security, cross-cultural issues governing security, cyberethics, simulation and modeling of security, and policy languages and proofs.

Human Centric Security

How does IT change our interactions, and how can more trustworthy IT change them further? This includes studies of on-line trust, ecommerce (business-to-business and business-to-consumer), digital government services, e-conferencing, on-line personae and anonymity, online news, on-line research and the ephemeral nature of information, on-line propaganda, and spam.

End System Security

This area includes tools and methods for building software artifacts, servers, and networks that are resistant to attacks and failures. This includes research into vulnerability assessment and identification, programming languages and tools for secure programming, mobile code and “sandboxes,” proof-carrying systems, trusted embedded systems, resilient server architectures, protection against malicious software, dynamic reconfiguration of systems, hardware architecture design, fault-tolerance, code tamperproofing, and penetration testing. Research into more secure operating systems and database systems falls in this area, as does research into better human-computer interfaces for security (HCI).

Network Security

Security becomes more complex when participating entities are physically separated from the current location; knowing who and what is communicating from a remote location complicates security decisions. Research in this area includes wireless computing, communication protocol design and verification, agent computation, quality-of-service protection, firewall design and testing, SCADA security, dynamic and protective routing, security for grid computing, and sensor net security.

Assured Identity and Privacy

There is a tension between increased confidence and granularity of authorization provided by better identification of on-line entities, and with the need to protect the privacy rights of individuals and organizations. This area includes research in role-based access control (RBAC), biometrics, pervasive surveillance (“Panoptic Effects”), privacy-protecting transformations of data, privacy-protecting data mining methods, privacy regulation (e.g., HIPAA and COPPA), oblivious multiparty computation, and trusted proxy research.

About our logo

What it represents
The CERIAS Logo is of a magnifying glass, of the kind often seen in old Sherlock Holmes movies and artist conceptions of scientists at work. In both cases, the magnifying glass makes small features visible, providing important clues to an investigator. This represents our own work in research and the practice of infosec - making new features visible to students, researchers and practitioners. In the field of the magnifying glass, the “IAS” is enlarged. This signifies the Center’s focus on issues of Information Assurance and Security.

Our logo was designed for CERIAS by Michael Tieman of Artists Gallerie. He donated his efforts to Purdue University, and we are grateful for his work.